In August, Gawker published thousands of confidential private documents from Bain Capital, the venture capital firm which previously employed Mitt Romney. Now, Bain is offering Gawker its help and expertise to expand.

Gawker seemed… well, a bit surprised to find out that the big, bad capitalists might actually nice people who genuinely wanted to help them grow their business.

Our corporate overlord Nick Denton received the following email yesterday from Mike Griffin, an analyst at Bain Capital Ventures, Bain’s venture capital arm. Griffin wanted to explore “synergies between Gawker and Bain Capital Ventures and…find ways that we could be helpful as you continue to grow.”

As it turned out, Bain didn’t realize that Gawker had capitalized on trashing their company:

“I’ve been working here for like a week now,” [Mike Griffin] said. “I just thought it was a unique idea. We work with a lot of similar companies. I had no idea about the [Bain stories]. I’m not sure it would work out. This is awkward.”

Indeed.